The Oregon Desert… It Ain’t Flat! (usually)

After eating some tasty Mexican food in Sisters I had to find a place to sleep for the night. I didn’t want to pay for lodging, at least not much, so I ended up driving to Smith Rock and paying the few bucks to sleep in the climbers’ bivouac there. I had brought my climbing shoes with me and had considered trying to get a hold of some friends in the Bend area to see if they wanted to climb but decided to just get on with my trip.

So, after driving to the REI in Bend and buying some snow shoes I headed on towards the Painted Hills part of the John Day National Monument. Holy cow is this area of Oregon mountainous. Just HUGE freaking hills everywhere. Again I was driving and wasn’t able to take pictures, but I was really blown away by just how mountainous the middle part of Oregon is. Anyway I eventually arrived at the Painted Hills and was able to explore that. Its a very cool area, though with limited hiking trails available. Needless to say I hiked all they had.

After John Day it was on towards the Alvord Desert, next to Steens Mountain. By this time it was starting to get dark, and it was DUMPING rain on me. Somehow I had convinced myself that I would be able to escape the rains in the Oregon desert. I guess not. In Burns, Oregon I stopped at a coffee shop for the internet (T-mobile only has service in like two towns east of the Cascades, apparently). I looked up the weather and in Joseph (the closest town to the Wallowas) it was supposed to rain for four or five days and then clear up. I figured I could go down to the Steens Mountain area, spend the day at the Alvord hot spring and desert, spend a couple days backpacking Steens and then check out Hells Canyon and hopefully after that the Wallowas would be good? Hopefully.

Anyway I drove most the rest of the distance to Steens that night in the dark and then pulled over in some random BLM land and slept again in my car. In the morning I drove the rest of the distance to the hot springs, where I intended to soak much of the day away. While I was at the springs I met another man who was on a road trip who seemed to think my chances of finding a weather window was very slim. It kind of made me start to doubt myself and question what the heck I was doing out there.

After soaking for a while I drove my car out onto the salt flat. (Oh yeah, the salt flat! I supposed I should tell you what that is! This particular salt flat is called the Alvord Desert. It is a 7 by 12 mile dry lake bed, and like other salt flats, or playas, similar to it, it can and sometimes is used for land speed record attempts.) It was definitely fun taking my car up to “high” speeds (I actually didn’t go more than 80, but I am not sure my car is capable of doing better than that). It was also just fun seeing how crazy flat it was. I had read about people camping in the playa overnight and enjoying the wide open dark skies and I kind hoped to do that. When I returned to the hot spring area though I met a couple who had just hiked Big Sand Gap, which I had heard of but not realized was so close. I decided to go do it. It was nearing the end of the day, so I packed up figuring I might sleep on top of the ridge.

That didn’t turn out to be the best of decisions. It had been still earlier, but despite being in a desert which only gets about 7 inches of rain per year, it appeared as if a storm was brewing from all the clouds blowing in. I descended to the desert and tried to find a place to set up my tarp down there. No luck. I could not find anywhere with solid enough sand to hold a stake in place. Again I started to wonder what the heck I was doing. Between feeling unsure about my chances of finding any clear skies, post holing through the Sisters, and staying up all night trying to find a camp, I wasn’t feeling very positive about how my adventure was getting off.

At any rate, the clouds cleared away, it didn’t rain, and I was able to cowboy camp without putting a shelter up.

The next day I left the playa and drove around to the other side of Steens, where I would start my backpacking trip. Not before stopping in Fields, Oregon. I stopped in at the general store, only intending to buy water and some snacks, but when I saw they served breakfast too, I figured I had better check out the local flavor. Or lack there of. Let me tell you, this was one of the worst breakfasts I have ever had. The pancake was straight out of a package (actually I think it was a whole package) and when I ordered an omelette I suppose I should have noted they did not list what else was in it, because there was nothing else in it. No tomatoes or bell peppers or cheese, not even salt and pepper, just a couple eggs and some milk whipped together and folded over. And when the waitress served me my pancake she scooped up a dollop of butter with her knife and then pushed it onto my pancake with HER FINGER.

Nonetheless, I guess I am glad I stopped, though next time I will probably go for the burger and shake. You know they had sold 4555 burgers and 6020 shakes since the first of the year?! And that’s nothing compared to the 6840 shakes they sold the year before! The waitress told me she didn’t suppose they would break the record by the end of the year, but hey, 2016 was a rough year for all of us. She also told me she drives the school bus for the school, and goes as far as 50 miles to pick some students up. I was there just before Halloween, so naturally she was wearing green face makeup and a wig while serving me. She informed me the kids don’t trick or treat, instead they trunk or treat – the parents just serve candy to all the kids out of their cars – since you know, 50 miles would be a long way to walk for some candy.

Fields, Oregon. Its definitely in the middle of freaking no where. On to Steens!

Three Sisters Loop…ish

So my first major planned destination was the Three Sisters area – but as I indicated in my last post, not before hitting up a hot springs! Cougar Hot Springs to be specific, otherwise known as Terwilliger.

No surprise here, I did not make it on the road until later than I had intended. I ended getting going around 2 or 2:30 or so, as I recall, and I figured I would have about an hour at the hot springs before sunset, when it closed – supposedly.

The drive there itself was beautiful. I had never been in that area of Oregon before but it was great (no pictures cause I was driving and in somewhat of a hurry). The hot springs themselves were even better. There were a decent amount of people when I first got there, but it thinned out quickly since I was there at the end of the day. I ended up talking with some locals who said the “closing time” was not really enforced, at least not in the off season, so I ended up staying a ways after dark. It was very relaxing and a nice way to start my trip. I didn’t take any photos, for obvious reasons, but here is a stock photo so you can see what it was like:

After leaving the hot springs, I drove the rest of the way to Sisters. I had a few things I needed to buy before my backpacking trip, so I did some shopping and then drove to the trail head so that I could get an early start the next day. It was rainy and wet, so I slept in my car at the trail head – not for the last time on this trip either.

I was planning on doing the whole loop around the Three Sisters, counter clockwise around the three mountains. I started off and pretty quickly was surrounded by signs of past volcanic eruptions – cinder everywhere. I have not seen that yet in the other Cascades I have explored, though to be fair Rainier is the only other I have circumnavigated. I also had some nice views of the Cascades to the north, including Washington, Three Fingered Jack and Jefferson.

Pretty soon I was encountering a good amount of snow. I love snow, and it makes everything more beautiful and epic looking, but it does present some challenges. In the first part of the day I was able to stay on top of the snow without breaking through, but as the day wore on I started post-holing. A lot. I was not super stoked on that. It was taking me waaaay too much effort to get anywhere to the point that I was not having too much fun. I was definitely regretting not buying snowshoes beforehand. I managed to find a good place to set up my tarp in the trees before it got dark and I came up with a plan for the next day, since my intended route was not going to work.

After studying my maps I ended up deciding the best route would be to go up and over the pass between South and Middle Sister, rather than continuing on trail around South Sister. This route would take me up higher, where I hoped to be able to better stay on top of the snow due to it being higher and colder, as well as seeing some cool high country and cutting out about 13 miles of post holing.

 

I ended up being very pleased with my decision. The travel ended up being much easier/more enjoyable as I was able to stay mostly on top of the snow. And better yet the high country was incredible! Going over the pass was definitely the highlight of my Sisters experience. South Sister was socked in clouds the whole time, making me feel even better about my route alternative decision – I had originally hoped to squeeze in a summit of South Sister, but it would have been impossible given the weather.

 

After making it over the pass I was able to reconnect to a trail on the other side, not that I was able to see it – it was covered in snow of course. I still was able to make my way with relative ease and eventually found myself on the same trail that Zach, Jacob and I had used on our North Sister misadventure earlier in the year. By that time I was back on solid ground and glad to be there.

Only as I was heading out did it really start to rain on me. It had been threatening rain the whole time but as I always seem to I had great luck with the weather. Nonetheless by the time I got back to my car I was totally soaked. I changed into some dry clothes, at a huge burrito at a crappy Mexican joint in town, and planned on buying snow shoes in Bend the next morning.

Time for an Adventure Road Trip – PNW Style!

So I had been longing for an adventure for some time. I had been feeling kinda stuck in a rut in Portland for a while, aside from Hood none of my mountaineering endeavors had been ultimately successful that summer and ever since the Wonderland Trail I had pretty much just worked my butt off, without break.

After two years of summer-long thru hikes in a row, spending most of 2016 in town seemed kind of a let down. I chose not to do anything longer, as tempting as it was to hop on the PCT, because I wanted to focus on paying off my school loans and working on my financially security in general. That didn’t sound particularly exciting or adventurous but I figured it would pay off in the future.

I had a rough start of 2016 unfortunately and only really started to get things in order by about mid year. From that time on I was finding more and more work, and I really was starting to make some savings and pay off my loans ahead of schedule. On paper that sounds great, but I still had a growing sense of restlessness and even a sense that I was somehow wasting my time.

So I started to plan a road trip around the Pacific Northwest, to get to the many awesome areas in Oregon and Washington I had never been. Up till then I had mostly explored within a couple hour radius of Portland. I especially wanted to explore the Wallowas in northeastern Oregon. And after finishing up (and getting paid for) a large paint job, I loaded up my totally awesome Ford Focus with all my hiking gear and hit the road for two and a half weeks. First major destination was The Sisters – but not before stopping at a hot springs!

Why the Divide?

So I totally meant to blog about moving out to Portland which is when I fell in love with travelling and i meant to blog about the AT and how it exceeded even my extremely high expectations. But I’ve only had 8 months since summiting Katahdin, how much can you expect out of a guy?

Anyway the legend of the Thru Tang Clan shall wait for another day.

Today i am on a train, called the Empire Builder, which runs from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois. I am taking it only to East Glacier, Montana, next to Glacier National Park. When I arrive there tomorrrow morning I will stop by the hostel to book a room for the night and then go to the ranger station to get my permit for hiking through Glacier. I also need to make a stop at the post office and buy my groceries for the first leg of my journey. If I have any time left i may go for a short day hike in the park before getting a good night’s rest at the hostel.

The next morning I will take the shuttle to the Canadian border.

And then I am going to walk to Mexico.

I’ve wanted to hiked the Continental Divide Trail since the moment I found out about it, which was sometime after I decided to hike the AT, but before I actually started.

Its just… so mysterious. Relatively few people ever attempt it. The trail isn’t finished or always well marked meaning that a person needs to be able to be able to navigate using a map and compass. Its absolutely grand, stretching from Canada to Mexico, three thousand miles through some of the most remote areas of the country and crossing some of the tallest mountains in the contental US. It will be absolutely wild, traversing country where grizzly bears, moose, elk, bison and more live as they did before humans made their imprint. It will at times be absolutely brutal, in the frigid vastness of the unforgiving mountains and the beating sun of the harsh desert. I expect it will be absolutely beautiful in all of those same places.

Another reason the CDT appeals to me so is the challenge of it. Hikers like to say that the AT is like high school, the PCT is like college, and the CDT is like your doctorate. I really feel like a hiker could step off the AT and be completely prepared to start the PCT and after completing that trail be completely prepared to start the CDT. The fact that I expect the CDT to be a step up in challenge from what I saw on the AT makes it seem all the more exciting. I’ve read about people who did the CDT as their first long distance trail and I’ve always thought that sounded so daring and awesome. Well I am very happy to have done the AT last year but I am also very excited to be meeting the new challenges the CDT is sure to present me with.

Even so, after finishing the trail I had still thought I might do the PCT next. For a ton of its own reasons the PCT does sound very appealing. When I do the PCT though, i definitely want it to be northbound. One of the most awesome things about the AT was the social aspect, and though its not quite as popular as the AT yet, the PCT is a very social trail too. Well for a handful of reasons I decided I would not be ready to hike until June instead of in April, which means a southbound hike. Southbounding means less hikers and thus less of a social hike. The CDT is not known to be extremely social no matter which direction you hike so it just made sense to hike the CDT this year.

But more than anything else, I am hiking the CDT because I just really want to do it.

And so I am going to.

I’m going to walk from Canada to Mexico.

Visiting Oregon.

Well in 2011 I was getting ready to go off to school and I was thinking a lot about Oregon. I had been accepted to Oregon State and my sister and my dad took a trip with me out west to check it out.

We flew into Portland and we only spent a few hours there but I knew from what I saw that I liked it a lot. We met a friend of mine who had moved there years ago at a bar with an outdoor patio and he had biked to get there and it was absolutely beautiful. We were visiting to see the Corvallis campus and Crater Lake NP but I knew I liked what I saw in Portland.

We visited the Corvallis campus which was nice and drove up a nearby mountain which was even nicer before heading down to Crater Lake National Park. We could not believe how much snow was there even though it was late April.

We actually drove to the north entrance which was completely blocked off by snow. We didn’t know what to think. We drove to the south entrance hoping for the best and were fortunate that it had actually been plowed. As it turns out, Crater Lake gets some of the highest snowfall in the country.

After visiting Crater Lake, we explored more of the Oregon countryside, which continued to be beautiful. Even though I spent a relatively short time in Portland, and even in though I ended up deciding not to go to school in Oregon, it definitely left an impact on me.

There is no good time to start blogging.

Man I have been meaning to do this for a while.

I’m a ridiculous sort of completionist, to the point that I’ll not do something entirely before I half ass it.

Not my best quality.

But I am listening to Godspeed now and I feel like talking about the woods.

So, anyway, I did some camping in between when I was a little kid going on vacations with my parents and before I started backpacking.

Mostly, I did car camping at music festivals with my friends. I loved the music, but as much as anything I loved the experience of camping out and cooking awesome meals (mostly brats, but who doesn’t love a brat) while camping out.

Before going to my first second Summer Camp, I bought my very own tent. It was a very functional/very heavy Coleman 4 person tent. I loved that tent. I lugged that into Summer Camp with me year after year. I’d also used it for camping out at my friend Kevin’s farm.

At some point I managed to convince my friend Jeff to go to Summer Camp Music Festival with me and camp there all four nights. To my utter bewilderment, he informed me this was his first camping experience ever. Five years later he would hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail with me. Who could have seen that coming?

I also in this time started the tradition of going on a yearly camping trip with my dad. We started out going to parks relatively near our hometown, but we eventually started going to National Parks out west, which is what started my love for national parks.

In the beginning…

I figured I might as well start this blog at the beginning, so here goes.

I owe much of my love of the outdoors to my dad. He was always encouraging us to enjoy and respect the environment. He got us started at a pretty early age too. My first camping trip was when I was one year old, apparently. I don’t remember it, but i do remember hearing about it.

It would have been my mom, my dad, my older sister (about 4 years old at the time) and I on the trip. I don’t know where we went camping at, but I am guessing it was somewhere local to Illinois. Anyway, I must have hated it, because I cried literally the entire time.

I got over it pretty quickly though because I have loved the outdoors as long as I remember.

I remember the first time I ever saw mountains. Growing up in Illinois I had never had the chance to see them until I was five, when the family took a train trip out to California. It was when we were approaching Denver that mountains came into view and I was the first one to see them. I was extremely proud of that fact at the time and I must say I still feel some of that pride today. I remember getting so excited that I must have become seriously annoying. “Mountains! Mountains! Look Mom! Look Dad! There’s Mountains!”

I continued to grow up in Illinois, which meant I didn’t get a chance to see many mountains except for when on family vacations. I still managed to have a lot of fun playing around in the woods in our backyard though.

I actually grew up in a small town, but my dad had always had a plot of land out in the country, and we would go there for picnics and morel mushroom hunting. Then when I was nine, my mom and dad built a house and we moved out there. I remember thinking it was so much fun to “go exploring” in the woods. We probably only had three acres or less of woods, but you can bet I knew every last inch of it.

My sisters had a lot of fun playing in the woods with me too. We used to make tee pees and try to shape rocks into arrowheads (this was never successful). This one summer in particular we got really excited about playing in the woods when we, much to our parents dismay, discovered this muddy ravine which was just perfect for a fort. The fort basically just consisted of us throwing some fallen tree limbs across the ravine in some semblance of a roof. It wasn’t much more than a muddy mess but in our minds it was awesome.

We continued to go on family vacations to cool outdoorsy destinations. I remember going to the Badlands and Mt Rushmore which took us through the black hills. I loooooooved the black hills. So beautiful. I remember thinking then I would love to live in the mountains someday. That vacation was pretty awesome in general. We took went to Custer State Park, and were able to drive our camper to this valley where during the evening, a herd of bison literally engulfed traffic. We were able to get on top of the camper and watch the bison walk by just feet away. It was quite the memorable childhood event.

On another vacation we went to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Grand Teton didn’t make as much of an impression on me as it did the second time I visited, but I was pretty amused my the origins of the name. I was super excited about Yellowstone though. That park is massive and we spent four days there I think and still had not seen it all. By the end of the fourth day my family had seen enough. I found this appalling. “There’s still an entire section we have not seen!”

Well my enthusiasm for exploration and the outdoors and my  love for mountains has never subsided. I live in Portland, Oregon now, and I have many more hiking opportunities than I did in Illinois and I try to take advantage as much as possible. I have lived here for more than a year and I still get excited every time I catch a glimpse of Mt Hood or Mt St Helens, or if I am lucky, Mt Ranier or Mt Adams. It seriously makes my day that much better just looking at them. “Look everyone! Mountains!”